American educator and critical author, born in Richmond, OH, on the 12th of November 1850, his father being the Rev. James Renwick Wilson Sloane, pastor there of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, and a noted abolitionist. The lad’s earliest recollections are of aiding the passage of runaway slaves to Canada. In 1855 the family removed to New York City, its home being the scene of many interesting conferences, in which the leading abolitionists took part. The son was sent to Mount Washington Collegiate Institute; entered Columbia College in his fourteenth year, graduating in 1868, and taught Latin and Greek for four years at the Newell Institute, Pittsburg. In 1872 he went to Berlin to study philology; and the next year became secretary to George Bancroft, then Minister for the United States to Germany, in which capacity Sloane assisted the historian in preparing the tenth volume of the History of the United States, and was for a time secretary to the legation. He went to Leipsic in 1876, and took his degree of Ph.D., his dissertation being Arabic Poetry Before the Time of Mahomet. He returned to the United States, and in 1877 became adjutant professor, and later professor of Latin at Princeton; and in 1883 was transferred to the chair of history. He subsequently made repeated visits to Europe, spending most of his time in France. During these visits he had access to the government archives of France, Great Britain and Italy, the result of his well-directed research appearing in his critical Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, which began to appear November, 1890, in the Century Magazine. This was republished in book form, the first volume appearing November 1896, with entirely new illustrations, reproduced from many famous original paintings. Among his other literary works are The Life and Work of J. R. W. Sloane (1888), a biography of his father; The French War and the Revolution (1893), giving a succinct view of European and American history for the quarter of a century previous to the outbreak of the French revolution; and edited the Life of James McCosh (1896). He was editor of the New Princeton Review (1885-88); one of the editors of the American Historical Review, and a contributor to the leading magazines. In November 1896, he was appointed Seth Low professor of history in Columbia University, New York City. (See authored article: George Bancroft.)
